Le Mariage

by Diane Johnson

  But the danger of Clara going to prison would vanish if they would permit hunters on their land. They were under no illusions about the quid pro quo. And her heart had hardened further about that. She had seen horrors in the village—the broken carcasses of deer, boar hanging in the butcher’s shop window, their little bristly faces still wearing the expressions of fear and agony with which they had turned in their final moments to face the dogs or the guns—she could not tell if they had been shot or harried to death. It seemed especially ugly to her that a hunter would sell his catch to a butcher, giving the lie to their claim to kill for tradition’s sake or even to feed their families. It was merely commerce and the love of blood.

  Antoine de Persand came over a second time, this time to invite the Crays to his house for lunch the following Sunday. He had something to propose to them, and wished also to make a gesture of neighborly support in view of their increasing isolation in a sea of hostile press and legal jeopardy.

  Delia’s indolence continued to irk Clara, and so did the time she spent with Serge, or in endless telephone discussion with the antique dealers of Sweet Home, Oregon. Gabriel she found charming. He would talk with equal passion of books or politics—but he also talked of organizing his passage and leaving France. Serge had advised him to be on the safe side by taking a train to somewhere like Brussels or Amsterdam and leaving from there in case his name was down on some French list of people to be stopped at the airport.

  Gabriel had the more immediate problem of claiming his belongings, including his passport, at the Hotel Le Mistral. This he planned to do today; Serge had given him money and Clara had offered to drive him into Paris when she took Delia to the Louvre.

  Delia had wanted to go every day to the Louvre. A few days before, when she tried it on her own, by bus and train, she had come back so tired that Clara had volunteered to drive her the next day and each day on the weekend. Today they would all go into Paris— Gabriel to pay his hotel bill, Delia to go to the Louvre, Clara to look in on poor Anne-Sophie, whose bitten arm was keeping her home though she would usually be in the flea market on a Monday.

  This would be the fourth or fifth time Delia had gone to the Louvre, staying only an hour or so each time, which had struck Clara as an intelligent, rather disciplined way to approach the vast riches of this monumental place. But she was a little surprised that Delia found so much to occupy her there. She did not think of Delia as someone profoundly interested in art, beyond the obligatory views of the Venus de Milo, the Victory of Samothrace, the Mona Lisa, and the strange painting of the two French duchesses or whatever they were, the one pinching the nipple of the other, always ogled by tourists, on which Delia remarked with disapproval.

  Before the arrival of Gabriel, it had crossed Clara’s mind that perhaps Delia and he had secret rendezvous there, she mentioned so often her wish to go there. The Louvre would be a perfect place to meet someone discreetly—her mind worked like this now. She imagined herself walking through the Flemish rooms with Antoine de Persand, hearing his thoughts on Van Eyck. Lunch at the Grand Vefour, then long afternoons of sex at the Hotel du Louvre or maybe the Opera Concorde, or maybe in an apartment he would rent, you heard Frenchmen had garçonnières where their wives never went. When she thought like this, her underthings would get damp. Antoine de Persand was on her mind almost as much as the imminence of jail.

  Today she let Delia out on the rue de Rivoli near the entrance to the Louvre—“I’ll meet you right here”—and drove to see Anne-Sophie, miraculously finding a parking place right in front of the building. She found Anne-Sophie apparently in the course of writing thank-you notes or dealing with responses to the wedding invitations. A stack of nesting envelopes and little cards of various sizes were piled on the coffee table. Anne-Sophie proferred one.

  “Does this look right to you? Madame Aix says it is, but she’s looking at it from the French point of view. Tim’s parents are divorced, that’s why Monsieur Gerald Nolinger and Madame Barzun Nolinger on a different line. You see we put their page in English? I have a friend who is marrying a man from Louvain and they put the page of invitation from his family in Flemish.”

  “Do you expect many people from America?”

  “Many more than I thought,” said Anne-Sophie. “I think a lot of his relatives had been thinking they were due for a nice French vacation anyway. We have already booked the hotels. Tim has a belle poignée of relatives. Also some of his friends from college.”

  “We’re looking forward to our part—the rehearsal dinner. Serge is very involved, you know. Plans are progressing.”

  “Oh, we are very pleased,” Anne-Sophie said. “It is si gentil. And for the reception after the wedding, what do you think about a cake? Madame Aix says that a ‘wedding cake’ with several tiers would be more chic than a croquembouche, especially as one is marrying an American. White icing, with amusing little figures on top, and decorated with flowers and sugar bells. There are a number of patisseries in Paris that would know how to construct such a cake.”

  “You should have both,” Clara decided. “Croquembouche for the Americans, they’ve never seen one.”

  At five she went to pick up Delia at the appointed spot on the rue de Rivoli. Gabriel was with her, and without luggage.

  “They’re watching the hotel,” he said. “A guy in the cafe across the street, it was completely obvious. I didn’t go in.”

  “But they had you once, they let you go. Why would they be watching the hotel?”

  “Not the French, the FBI,” he said.

  “Surely it can’t be so complicated,” cried Clara, suddenly exasperated with the cloaks and daggers, feeling, not for the first time, that Delia and Gabriel were carrying their strange game, whatever it was, too far. “Just write me an attestation and I’ll go get your suitcase myself.”

  35

  Take It Off, Take It Off

  The arrival of the guard dogs at the Crays’ meant that the local postman, who in any case would have sympathized with the mayor, refused to deliver mail to the house and instead left it in a big box by the front gate. It was necessary to go into town in person to pick up a registered letter, and when one arrived on Thursday, Cray suggested Tim go with Clara. Tim knew he was deteriorating into an errand boy, but he didn’t care, he was interested in the whole situation, knew there’d be a story eventually, and felt quite reckless in his fascination with Clara.

  But he was beginning really to suffer from the contradictions in his own life, marching steadfastly toward the altar with Anne-Sophie while hoping on some level to seduce Clara Holly, and knowing all the same there wasn’t the least chance of that. He knew that to her he was just an eager man of her own age who danced attendance on her husband. There was also her curious (to him) attachment to the idea of marital fidelity. While he had no intention of being an unfaithful husband, once married—all this imagined torrid sex with the beautiful Clara having occurred like backstory before the present of married life would unfold—it was becoming troubling the way it kept popping unbidden into his reveries.

  When Tim’s five thousand dollars arrived, sent by his mother from his account, something in him rebelled—a huge sum to plunk down for some French bookcases he was already mortgaged for and morally entitled to. He thought he was probably being petty, and knew he was being unreasonable given that this was the French custom, but he brooded. There were a zillion better things to do with this money. A big diamond for Anne-Sophie, some crazy trip for the two of them.

  “Ha ha, you look like a man who’s getting married soon,” Cray had said one day. “Who was it said that with marriage women change their names and men their natures? Relax. Marriage is an excellent condition. That is, for an uxorious type like me. The House of Uxor. I wonder if that was a pun in Poe’s mind? I must check the etymology....”

  Was it true that men changed their natures? Apparently not, in Tim’s case; he knew he was going to go along being the same old person no matter how much he would like to have th
e fresh heart and ardor of a newlywed.

  Clara drove them in her car to the post office. She wore the vague, dreamily preoccupied expression she had worn since her week in jail.

  “What do you think of Serge’s plans? Do you think the film will work? What does he tell you?”

  “Wouldn’t know. It’s Delia he talks to. All they seem to talk about is doomsday and black helicopters.”

  “I don’t go to America often enough. I should know more about all that.”

  “You’ve read his box of clippings.

  “If you believe what you read, the world is coming to an end next year. Serge believes there are millions of paranoids with guns, vast arsenals of white supremacist weapons, lone enforcers, vengeance-obsessed pipe bombers who’ll be out there.”

  “The reality isn’t in question. I kind of worry about what he’s going to make of it,” Tim said. “I’m not sure I understand his politics.”

  Clara sighed. “Nor I.”

  Clara double-parked outside the post office and went in. Tim got out of the car to watch the village doings, and could therefore see that three or four men in hunting clothes getting out of a van in front of the boulangerie had seen her and now were hurrying toward the post office shouting, “C‘est elle, and Voilà la dame.” The woman who stole the boiseries from the château. She who impedes hunting.

  In the few minutes it took for Clara to collect her letter, a knot of about twenty people had assembled outside the post office. Concerned, Tim moved nearer the door of the building to wait for her. She stopped in the doorway when she saw the crowd, wondering what was going on. He moved toward her, but not before others began a demonstration of angry shouting, random accusations of troublemaking and variations on Yankee-go-home. They did not look like rough farmers so much as city people dressed in their weekend clothes, but they made a mutter that sounded rough and rural. “That’s her.” “Yeah.” “Oh, so that’s her.”

  Then one of them shouted, “On voudrait te voir déplumée.” “A poil!” Strip, like you’ve stripped us. Somebody else added, “Oui, à poil, let’s see her naked.” This caused laughter and more shouting. Tim remembered that a woman government minister had recently been similarly harassed. The implications of depluming soon took on a rather lewd urgency, for Clara’s beauty did not escape this bunch of Frenchmen. Take it off, they shouted. They advanced closer to her. Now Tim was seriously worried and began to push his way through them to her side.

  “A poil, let’s see her bare.” It seemed that they might tear at her clothes. Someone shouted a solution à la Lady Godiva to the hunting ban.

  Clara saw Tim and reached out for him from where she stood on the steps with the men pressing in on her. Tim threw his shoulder into the scrum, knocking one man who pushed him back. Tim might have hit him, felt inclined to start a fight. But he restrained himself. That wouldn’t help Clara. Tim again threw his shoulders into the throng, moved a few more people, who stared at him as if his violence was excessive; he sheltered her in his arms. The crowd parted, and they hurried the few steps to her car.

  She shook and was slightly damp with fear. He clumsily cradled her in his arms, and planted his lips to her brow where it was moist at the hairline, and pushed her into the driver’s seat. That was the extent of an embrace he had often imagined in further detail. He got in on the passenger side. In the instant he had held her, he had felt her heart pounding. A phrase came to him from Anne-Sophie’s wedding magazine—coeur en chamade. That he could feel her inner turmoil suggested that she was a woman of almost unnatural self-possession, protection against some violence or passion within her, that might someday break out. He was lost. He loved her hopelessly and against his will.

  The hunters, half laughing, half angry, crowded the car but made no effort to impede them as they started up. Then Clara shifted into the wrong gear, first instead of reverse. As it lurched forward into the crowd of men, she slammed on the brakes and killed the motor. The men pulled back from this dangerous display of inept driving, except for one who screamed, “Mon pied, mon pied! Madame!” She had stopped on his foot.

  “Oh no, oh shit,” she cried. “How could I do that?”

  Tim leapt out to stare at the man’s foot pinned under the front wheel. The victim stood stone still for fear of further injury, or because he could not move. Tim growled something to the effect that he had better move his ass.

  He couldn‘t, of course. Clara had to back off his foot. Staring at the gearshift as if fearing to make a mistake and run over him altogether, she carefully started the car, put it in reverse, and released his foot. She drove a few feet off, planning to get out herself to inspect the damage. But the injured man limped away, his face a scowl of imminent lawsuit. Tim watched him, got in, and Clara pulled into the road.

  “I don’t know if it breaks your foot to have it driven on, maybe not?” she said.

  “It probably doesn‘t, those little flexible bones in the foot. He was walking perfectly.”

  “I didn’t feel anything, I should have felt his foot,” she kept saying, and “Are you sure you saw him walking away?” At least her mind was off the nasty little episode on the post office steps.

  But she was shaken in several ways, and after that didn’t want to go anywhere alone.

  The registered letter, no surprise, turned out to be from the mairie, announcing a survey of local roads and the terrain adjoining them, which would require the presence of surveyors on the property of Monsieur et Madame Cray.

  This incident more than rattled Clara. Emotions had got out of hand in a moment, but the larger implication was that she and Serge, despite the fact that people nodded to them in the shops or at the little concerts sometimes held in the Bibliothèque Municipale, were hated and had been insulted. The insinuating, lewd jeers, and someone actually pulling as if to rip her sleeve, had been as degrading as the jail, and in some way more frightening. The unpopular game she and Serge were playing had revealed its dangers. She thought of the oiled gun cases, the hand-carved decoys she saw in shops for thousands of francs, the boots and knickers—male privilege, old-world custom, a strange country and they had run afoul of some deep stream in it, some buried barbarism and passion. She thought of the American South, of the Klan—could the burnt crosses happen, or the charred corpses happen, in peaceful, semi-rural France ?

  She called her mother after this, not to talk about what had happened but to ask if her mother let hunters across the field behind the paddock in the pheasant season.

  “Oh, honey.” Mrs. Holly laughed. “That’s years. Since they put those subdivisions in behind the Thrifty, they don’t hunt around here, it’d be someone’s backyard. Your father would go out for pheasant, but they had to go as far as Medford by the end,” she said.

  It was after the incident at the post office that he let himself realize that, more than wanting to sleep with her, he’d fallen in love with Clara too, by itself a fact he tried not to pay too much attention to, given the existence of Anne-Sophie and Cray, his ignorance of her state of mind about anything, and his general sense of unworthiness (though, to tell the truth, he considered himself less unworthy than the fat Cray or a balding Frenchman like Persand). He could just put up with the hot promptings of desire, the adolescent panic, the yearning, but he deplored his regression from the sincere, joyful, and easy love he felt for Anne-Sophie. He didn’t like having to be aware of his emotions at all. He brooded. He felt love, but would settle for sex. If he could entice her to sleep with him once, it would ease his misery. He would settle for one time. That would get sex out of the way, relegating it to the status of mere memory, a dream of the ideal. Then he’d be ready for marriage.

  36

  Tim and Antoine Talk

  Another thing that had shaken Clara was the realization that it was not entirely by accident she had driven onto the man’s foot. For an instant, in a fury, in a panic, she could have driven straight into the throng of men without remorse, even with glee. The men who had said à poil“
and might have put their hands on her. Wanted to put their hands on her, in anger, and under their anger the thing they could do to a woman. She had liked it when Tim Nolinger had roughed up the one. She felt her life was descending into primitive regions of fear and lust, and that at some level she was finding these better than lassitude.

  In her heart an elaborate set of rationalizations was evolving: life is so short, one must seize on happiness, even happiness as thinly defined as one moment of passion, a fleeting instant of being loved, of loving in a feverish paroxysm of sensation and emotion not destined to be repeated, after which you give yourself up to good works. She would promise to give herself up to good works and the devoted attention Serge needed for his genius to flourish, and to Lars if only he would be returned to her, in exchange for some happy uncomplicated sex soon, some kind of funny joy with a relative stranger, all the better, no complications or future. That the stranger was resolved against all this was a separate problem.

  And she didn’t even know the woman who was thinking, feeling this way. She was a stranger too.

  Clara brought up marital fidelity as a subject so often that it must have been weighing on her. Or rather, Tim could see, infidelity was on her mind whether she knew it or not. Was it possible she was worrying about Delia and Cray spending so much time together? Delia was often up in Cray’s study for an hour or two at a time. But Clara denied feeling concerned.

  “Serge and Delia?” Clara would say. “Why would I care? It could be a sign that his creative energy is coming back. Wouldn’t that be more important than so-called fidelity? Fidelity and infidelity are nonissues for me—it’s so unimportant which person you sleep with, finally. I can’t see why people throw their lives away. Anyway, Serge?” Still it was clear she was irritated by Delia.